Yandex has suspended operations at a data centre in Vladimir, east of Moscow, after the facility was damaged in a Ukrainian drone strike — the third attack on the Russian technology company's sites in a single week. The company, often described as "Russia's Google", said nobody was injured but some services were unavailable to users.
Earlier in the week Yandex said it was struggling to maintain services after two of its five data centres were hit. It confirmed on Telegram that the Vladimir facility's operations had been "completely suspended" while it worked to restore connectivity.
Kyiv said it was targeting places that provide revenue for Moscow's war effort, and that the strikes could force Russia to divert resources to repairs. The attack came hours after President Trump warned Ukraine should "damn well stop" striking Russian oil refineries so Moscow could release more diesel to the global market — a deal that has caused a diplomatic row with President Zelensky.
What is new here
Infrastructure has been struck throughout this war: power stations, refineries, railways. A data centre is a different kind of target, and this is among the clearest cases of one being treated as military infrastructure.
The reasoning is not obscure. Yandex is search, ride-hailing, deliveries, maps, cloud hosting and payments for a large share of the Russian population, and a company of that size is a tax base and a logistics layer as well as a website. Kyiv's stated rationale — revenue for the war — puts it in the same category as a refinery.
The consequence is what matters beyond this war. Civilian cloud infrastructure concentrates an enormous amount of ordinary life into a small number of physical buildings, and those buildings have addresses. Three strikes took out a majority of one national-scale provider's capacity in a week.
The arithmetic of five
Five data centres sounds like redundancy. It is not much.
Redundancy works when the surviving sites can absorb the load of the failed ones. Lose two of five and the remaining three carry 67% more each; lose three and the survivors are being asked to do two and a half times their normal work. That is why Yandex reported struggling to maintain services rather than failing over cleanly — capacity planning assumes one site goes down, not most of them.
It is also why "we have multiple data centres" is a weaker assurance than it sounds, and why the useful question for any provider is not how many sites they have but how many they can lose.
Why a Bangladeshi organisation should read this
The specific scenario is remote. The structural lesson is not, and it is cheap to act on.
Most Bangladeshi organisations that have moved to the cloud sit in a single region — usually Singapore or Mumbai — because that is the nearest, cheapest and lowest-latency option. Single-region hosting is a bet that the region stays available, and the realistic threats here are not drones: they are a submarine cable cut, a regional provider outage, a billing or sanctions dispute that suspends an account, or a national-level internet disruption of the kind this country has already experienced.
The practical step is not multi-region hosting, which most organisations cannot justify. It is knowing the answer to one question before it is needed: if the region is unreachable for 48 hours, what does the organisation still have locally — data, credentials, a way to contact customers — and has anyone tested it?
What a strike actually takes out
A data centre is not destroyed by damage in the way a bridge is. The servers are replaceable and usually insured; what stops is everything that depends on power, cooling and a working network path into the building.
That is why Yandex described operations as suspended rather than lost. Cooling failure alone will shut a facility down within minutes, because the hardware throttles and then halts to protect itself. Restoring service is then a question of utilities and connectivity, not of replacing computers.
It also explains the pattern of three strikes in a week. Repeatedly interrupting a site is cheaper than destroying it and achieves much of the same effect, because a facility that keeps going down cannot be relied on to carry anyone else's load.
On the physical scale of this industry, see Scotland's 23 proposed data centres.
